Mood:  surprised

It gets lonely in the dark...

    It's 10pm at time of writing. The weekend is on the way out — what a relief. Weekends are the low points of all my weeks. My drug consumption hits a low, as does the mood. I count myself fortunate to have my sanity back as I speak. In times past my head has been like a radio set with frequencies bleeding into my own thoughts. I sometimes couldn't tell what was really going on — in the objective world out there — and what was just illusion. Lost in a hall of mirrors reality reflected itself so far over and back again I lost touch with where I myself stood. I will explain what I mean at some future time. As I say I'm simply grateful to be sane(r!) these days.

    A v. good friend did cook the most gorgeous Sunday lunch. Roast chicken. Roast potatoes. Sugar snap peas from the garden. Brussels sprouts. Swede. Lovely thick gravy — yummy! Thank you. I do appreciate my friends nowdays (I haven't always done so I'm ashamed to say — another of the follies of my youth.)

    Chaos is around me. People drunk and crying. Peole deranged. I get so sued to such madness; it's only in rare moments of clarity that I see the utter insanity going on. It's so unhealthy. I'm not giving details for I don't want to go into other people's misery right now. Save it to say, I'm not in a happy house. I'm really not.

    Britain is thee most CCTVd country on earth. We had 4,000,000 security cameras+++ at the last count. That is more than the USA with its four-and-a-half times greater population. The average Brit is captured on camera — however many hundred times a day I honestly don't recall. I believe it's 300+. Our roads bristle with thousands of speed cameras raking in millions in fixed-penalty fines. In US$ the top earning cameras are millionaires — outstripping some premier daytime soap stars in their Hollywood incomes.

    New cameras are already in action that automatically scan every numberplate as it whizzes past, crosschecking every licence number against a central database that will send old bill scurrying to apprehend you if you're even an alleged suspect of a crime.

    Hear the latest! Now, for the 2012 Olympics — wahey!! Cameras are proposed that will pick up conversations from as far away as one hundred metres, scanning them for fearful or threatening tones of voice and automatically scuttling security to any dodgy-sounding verbal exchanges.

    When I was at school, we did a short-story in English classes about a nightmare world where nobody was ever able to be alone because everyone was in 24-7 contact by mobile telephone.

    (This was several years before mobile phones were ever a part of daily life.) I don't believe anyone in my class took seriously the idea that the telephone would become the ball-&-chain of the 21st century.

    Add to this George Orwell's 1984 — it's truly frightening how much of that book is dawning true.I always thought Poitically Correct Speak echoed "Newspeak" — loudly — though my politically correct friends of a decade ago mostly disagreed with me then.

    All this is known as boiled frog syndrome. Put a frog in a pan of tepid water. He swims around happily. Put pan on hob. Frog continues to bathe contentedly as temperature rises... Obviously it's most probably an urban myth:— but,as legend has it, the frog will continue bobbing blithely about, not noticing the gradual but inexorable rise in temperature until it is too late: he is literally boiling to death. And that is what is happening to us...

Posted by gledwood at 10:00 PM GMT

Updated: Wednesday, 29 November 2006 10:02 PM GMT

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Mood:  sharp

THERE ARE TWO WAYS of tackling heroin addiction.

• 1 Detoxification which can be
• A Cold Turkey or
• B Medication-Assisted Supervised (methadone, dihydrocodeine, buprenorphine, etc is given in reducing doses to minimize withdrawals)
• 2 Substituation ie give the patient methadone or some other opioid to substitute for the heroin

The problems with detoxing are that if the addict isn't ready (he or she may genuinely believe he/she's ready to come off before detox) the whole experience can be so distressing the addict simply runs crying back to gear with a stronger resolve never to sufffer like that again. Ie -- far from putting the patient off, addiction is only reinforced.

One myth that holds sway over much of the general population seems to be that the best way to treat an addict is to get them off that stuff ASAP! & that "Cold Turkey is over in a week." True the physical part is. But "clucking" is a shock that takes time to get over. Anxiousness, mood swings, depression poor sleep and general exhaustion can persist for weeks.

If you're going to come off in this way -- make sure you have something to do once you are clean. A change is as good as a rest. Get away from as many of the people, places and prompts of your past life as you can manage. This is easier said than done. After some years a typical addict knows hardly anyone who's not on drugs.

Narcotics Anonymous (NA) can be an enormous help. There are meetings all over the world in English and all manner of other languages. If you're serious about doing the 12-step programme you must follow it to the letter (you can't pick and choose aspects you like, eg you must give up booze as well as ALL drugs except lifesaving medications). AND you MUST get a SPONSOR.

As for Section B Assisted Detox, only a reputable clinic can do this properly. (You can even be knocked unconscious!)

Find out in advance the House Rules.

Eg: Are mobile phones allowed? What's the policy on tobacco and caffeine? What medication is given (including sleeping meds) over what type of timetable? How late is bedtime? What is the visitor policy? How long will I be there? What's the food like? If it's state sponsored, do I contribute £/€/$ & how much?

Again, you must have a proper plan for when you come out!

On both counts A & B I'm speaking from experience!

Obviously these pointers are only my view. I am still using. I tried and failed. For someone who gets told I "think too much" I was guilty of awfully bad planning. I had no clear idea of what to do once rehab was accomplished. Literally none at all. Or perhaps "denial" was the issue. Do your own research and take whatever path you choose with your eyes open. Failure can be expensive!

This post 1/2 finished. Will update L8R.- Gled xx

Posted by gledwood at 7:42 PM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 26 November 2006 8:12 PM GMT

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Mood:  quizzical

If you're wondering why so many posts in one day it's because those were drafts.

Anyway, is a "blog" meant to be an online diary or not? I've not had too much success trawling the cyberlands for other people's. (I would have said www, but my present address has no "www", does anybody know why?)

Is anybody out there at all? An entire week; well over a billion potential readers and no-one's stumbled across me yet... I've had a stab at registering with a couple of search engines. I don't really know the score re this. If anybody does happen to find this and has the requisite know-how, could you please help me out. I'd be eternally grateful.

Many thanks,

                      Gled

Posted by gledwood at 7:27 PM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 26 November 2006 7:38 PM GMT

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Mood:  hungry

It's actually 2am. And a piece of paper. I am not getting out of bed to use the computer.

    Just had a hit (as if you really wanted to know that). But we're going through one of those periods: the gear is tiddly-weak and yet I read the news today (oh boy!) -- A World Record Heroin Harvest came in last year. & according to The Guardian, "Heroin supply exceeds demand." One doomsayer predicted  on BBC Radio, Victorian opium-dens are prime to make a comeback, UK sezures of raw Opium are soaring at their highest-ever levels.

    I can see the insidious effect Opium might have if it does become widely available here. The student types, backpackers, young people on the Brink of Life who wouldn't go within a mile of the Bad Brown Sugar might well succumb to the supposed "romance" of the Big "O" -- imagery of Romantic Poets, Kublah Khan and Oriental Promise.

    Just because the stuff is weak and sticky and has a thousand years of folklore behind it doesn't mean it wouldn't lead to heroin as surely as the Silk Road leads to China.

    Opium is merely a fancy gateway to a dreary world. An addict is a slave. Opiates make great painkillers for the sick and the dying. But when abused, they're basically drugs of addiction. Heroin doesn't keep "casual users" for long.

    Take it from one who knows!

Posted by gledwood at 12:40 PM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 26 November 2006 12:56 PM GMT

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Mood:  sharp

DID I EVER TELL YOU about my fairytale life? No I didn't.

    I have, in the past, had an uncanny knack of spotting dropped drugs on the pavements of this metropolis.

    One example: One afternoon I'm trudging along a dank and leaf-strewn alley. A tiny blue thing catches my eye.

    Don't pick it up, I tell myself. It's only masking tape.

    Of course I picked up said blue masking tape. It was actually burnt-wrapping of carrier bag. Began to unpick it. A little brown powder trickled out.

    The next day, I felt like some more drugs, so I revisited the alley. Sure enough, waiting for me among the mingled sludge is another bag of gear.

    In the fairytales, of course, it all happens in threes.

    On the third day I was on my hands and knees for twenty minutes in the mud, scratting desperately for my free fix.

    I never found it.

    The moral of the story is right there, dear Readers.

Posted by gledwood at 12:38 PM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 26 November 2006 1:05 PM GMT

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Mood:  smelly

WHAT FUTURE? Seriously -- what future at all? I've lost my Best Years to illness and addiction. I can't go on like this. But I do. I do go on precisely the same, day in, year out. What changes but the date? Other people build and travel. I'm tied here. To this one place. Because my dealers are here. Oh I feel sick to the stomach and I hate myself.

    If actions speak louder than words, mine bear witness to years of selfloathing.

Posted by gledwood at 11:03 AM GMT

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Mood:  don't ask

Okay so we're up and running now. I ought to be excited but actually I'm depressed. I'm not sure whether I even believe in "depression" as an "illness" as such. I do suspect that too many Professionals have medicalized Unhappiness into so many subtypes and to such an extreme that almost any human behaviouf can be attributed to some newly recognized or relabelled psychiatric "disorder".

    I say that  what I have suffered from since childhood is Unhappiness. I've had some demoralizing encounters with psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors. One of these prescribed for me (among a huge many other weird and wonderfully named concoctions) the antipsychotic Haloperidol: Take these tiny capsules three times a day and they might cause some muscle stiffness.

    Some??! I'd only just taken my third dose and was minding my own business ambling up the road when my legs very nearly gave out from under me. I barely made it across the road to a pharmacy where I explained I'd taken Haloperidol. The pharmacist took one look at me and called an ambulance at once.

    I was bundled on to a stretcher and from stretcher to trolley, my entie body twisting like a corkscrew. Then they left me in a cubicle. There I writhed for about an hour until the doctors came, shoved a canula in my wrist and gave me an IV hit of a drug used for Parkinson's Disease. I pity people with Parkinson's if that's the level of agony they suffer every day.

   I was sent back to the psychiatrist with a stern letter advising never to prescribe such noxious stuff again.

    My caring shrink never looked me in the eye. He simply wrote out a script for something else, asked the same monotonous questions about my mood and sent me packing without so much as an apology.

    Psychiatrists go through at least 7 years' training to qualify -- only to succumb to a more severe form of the most basic prejudices we're all subject to. I.e. now that I'm called a Junkie my Problem is labelled Drugs. When I was in great distress but not a smackaddict the problem was named Depressed Mood and they prescribed drugs of their own more poweful than anything a street dealer could sell to you. It's a MY DRUGS -VS YOUR DRUGS situation. LET ME medicate you. But if you dare medicate yourself we will insult you within earshot, calling you and your kind deceptive and manipulative. And if we do ever listen to you, we'll hear what we've been trained to listen out for -- not what you're actually trying to say.

    All common sense has been trained out of some of these "Professionals".

    Tell you what, though; this rant has lightened the old mood a little. Ha!

    There is heroin nearby but I'm trying not to take it. I'm broke and craving a drink and a ciggie. It's been raining so the dogends at hte busstop are too soggy to smoke. I could really do with a can of white cyder and a rollup.

    Cravings are the Root of Unhappiness.

    I'm reminded of one of the huge paradoxes of drugs -- that the heroin that can make you crave nothing else at all will, in the end, make you crave it more than anything.

    No-one can ever explain to a nonaddict just what it is that addiction does to you. It's a sickness of the very soul. All I can repeat is the common mantra: Drugs really aren't cool; Don't end up like me.

Posted by gledwood at 10:50 AM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 26 November 2006 12:57 PM GMT

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Mood:  mischievious

Righty-Ho Then! Had me cyder n chips. I couldn't fail to note all these ads springing up about me. I feel like I'm surrounded by billboards. At first it was drug treatments and detox clinics (v. posh sounding, too). But having ranted yesterday how much I loathe swineflesh for my Junkie Sausages -- what should spring up but Pork Recipes, Porky Plus etc. Oh dear!

  I was up by the shops yesterday with my friend who I'll call Marilyn. Imagine Marilyn Monroe, not dead, stoned out of her brains on Valium with a brash Cockney voice to boot. Spotting a Chinese vendor of electroglinting Xmas keyrings she bumbled up in full havoc-causing mode. "'Ere? How much are those?" she demands.

  Two pounds comes the answer. (I bet in New York City they're $2 or less.) Well anyway, at the top of her remarkably loud voice, Marilyn goes on to ask, "Have you got a passport? Have you got a visa to be 'ere?" Poor Chinese girl shakes her head. "Well I'm calling the police!"

  The poor Chinese girl vanished in a flash to the great amusement of her fellow traders/hawkers/sign a direct debit for charity and pay my bills for me people & sundry leafletters.

  Earlier on, Valium Marilyn had spotted a particularly overcrowded cybercaff and shrieked, "Ere, what are they all sitting in there like that for?" (pointing at the boxed-in wooded partitions).

  Rapping her rings on the plate-glass window, half a dozen 20somethings of all nationalities gawped on in surprise as, approaching top volume she yelled, "Are you all right in there? Have you got enough room to breathe? Bloody hell! Looks like the inside of a prison van in there!" And went on to describe her Holloway (women's prison) experiences much to the glance-exchanging delight of everyone at the nearby busstop.

  Wonder what ads I'll get this time? Let's add some cheeky choice wind-up words and see...

  HAEMORRHOIDS oh my haemorrhoids/haemorrhoid PILES anus piles PILES throbbing doctor GP embarrassing embarrassment DESPERATION...

  L8Rs folks,

                      Gleds

                                 xx

Posted by gledwood at 6:52 PM GMT

Updated: Friday, 24 November 2006 7:17 PM GMT

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Mood:  rushed

I've posted nothing for two days because I've been so depressed, musing especially to myself, WILL ANYBODY ANYWHERE EVER READ THIS? I fear not. So this might as well be a Secret Diary Online.

  Having said that, I can't resist giving my recipe for Junkie Sausages.

  Equipment required: 1 pan (sauce or frying but 2 pans is handier, if you haven't sold the 2nd one of gear); 1 fork; 1 knofe (optional); 1 clean plate (or sheet of newspaper if desperate).

  Ingredients: Cooking oil or marge, beef sausages (not pork -- I'm not into Halal or Kosher, but why anyone would want to bring entrails of a dead swine into their home, least of all into the kitchen, is beyond me); value baked beans; coarse ground black pepper/Worcester Sauce/Tabasco to taste.

  You must be: Sober enough to stand up.

  Method: Heat ring to medium-high, add oil to pan, separate sausages. Plonk however many required into pan (3 is quite sufficient for one person). Whether or not you "prick" the sausages is immaterial for once they're browned all over by careful turning (about 4 mins) you either chop them into little stumps with a knife (simple method) or, unable even to find a knife though you're sure there used to be one soewhere around here, you use the aforementioned fork to prick-prick-prick all around and cut each sausage into 3-5 sections. Fry the upended stumps, giving all a good crisping (about 3 mins each side). Test one stump if unsure as to whether cooked - any pink showing needs further frazzling.

  Turf cooked sausages on to plate or newspaper. Pour hot oil into empty cider can or down toilet - NOT down sink where it will resolidify causing gross inconvenience.

  Now cook baked beans. Same pan may be used if required. When beans done dump over sausages on plate -- or if no plate, dump sausages back from newspaper to pan. Add black pepper/whatever else to taste -- ta-daa!

Literally none of my dealers had crack today, except the one who's furthest out of my way and is being a real ripoff artist of late. I sat at a friend's house for much of the afternoon then perused the shops. I'm proud NOT to be a Shoplifter and hence not banned from all of them. If the bookshop banned me I think I really would lie across the railway tracks. All afternoon (I'm posting this the next day) I was promised a call back when he finally managed to pick up this White. No such luck. So I tried someone else who was literally picking up just then. Because I only wanted £10 worth -- the minimum buy -- and there was (I presume) something rivetting on Sky, he decided he would not be bothered to drive the 10 minute distance from his manor to mine. So in the ned I did have to take the bus to Mr Stingy and back. I know he was peed off because I didn't buy brown as well (he knows me well enough to know I got it elsewhere). Got back. All coke gone in half an hour. Really wanted more and have money. i think runningto and from a dealer for more and more white is so depressing. I'm an addict through and through, I admit that. The nly drug I do use end-to-end some days is alcohol. Because I tend to buy only one can at a time the local shops hate me. Not only do they have to see my ugly mug every hour or two every day, they hate me more because they with I were a shoplifter so they had an excuse to ban me. Speaking of which, has only made me crave alcohol more. It's cold and raining; I'm not in the mood to go outside... must go anyhow.

Posted by gledwood at 11:26 AM GMT

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Mood:  irritated

Hi - GLEDWOOD THE CONFESSOR here. This is a space to house my CONFESSIONS of a DRUG ADDICT. Heroin, crack, booze... you name it, I've been there, done it... still doing it, more to the point.

I'm keeping this blog to show the world that there is more to the condition of addiction than the cliches everyone knows. Yes I acknowledge I have a serious problem. But I AM getting help. I AM trying to sort myself out. And you never know - maybe something I post here might eventually help someone else.

Well I'm going to sign off here. I've had such hassles with opening blogs only for the black hole of cyberspace to mysteriously swallow them up. Let's see what happens next...

Posted by gledwood at 8:58 PM GMT

Updated: Monday, 20 November 2006 10:27 PM GMT

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